Congress plays name game with federal buildings

Members of appropriations committees on both sides of Capitol Hill are retiring this year, so the inevitable is occurring: They're getting projects in the annual funding measures named after them.

So far, the House Interior Appropriations bill calls for a downtown building near the Holocaust Museum to be named after Rep. Sidney Yates, D-Ill., the longtime chairman and ranking member of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. House VA-HUD Appropriations ranking member Louis Stokes, D-Ohio, is likely to get a National Institutes of Health building named after him, as is Sen. Dale Bumpers, D-Ark. In addition, something called the U.S. National Rice Germ Plasma Evaluation and Enforcement Center in Arkansas is being renamed the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center.

Sometimes the efforts to honor members do not work out as planned. Appropriators tried to name a road through Fort Bragg after Rep. Bill Hefner, D-N.C., only to discover that the road already had a name. Instead, Hefner will get two buildings at the fort named after him.

Attempts to name programs after authorizers have run into problems too. Congress named the direct student loan program after former Rep. William Ford, D-Mich., the one-time chairman of the old Education and Labor Committee, only to see him leave Congress and go to work for people opposing the program. And several years ago, Congress attempted to name either a part of or the entire Guaranteed Student Loan program after former Sen. Robert Stafford, R-Vt. The problem was the legislation was so confusing that nobody was clear which program was named after the Senator.

Presumably, such confusion is avoided when buildings are named after people.